Beirut: Israel rushed to beef up its rocket defenses on its northern border on Sunday to shield against possible retaliation after carrying out two airstrikes in Syria over 48 hours - an unprecedented escalation of Israeli involvement in the Syrian civil war.
Syria and its patron Iran hinted at possible retribution, though the rhetoric in official statements appeared relatively muted.
Despite new concerns about a regional war, Israeli officials signaled they will keep trying to block what they see as an effort by Iran to send sophisticated weapons to Lebanon's Hezbollah militia ahead of a possible collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.
Israel has repeatedly threatened to intervene in the Syrian civil war to stop the transfer of what it calls "game-changing" weapons to Hezbollah, a Syrian-backed group that battled Israel to a stalemate during a monthlong war in 2006....
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06:19 AM, May 06, 2013
Beirut: Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital on Sunday, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be bound for Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said. The attack, the second in three days and the third this year, signaled a sharp escalation of Israel's involvement in Syria's bloody civil war. Syrian state media...
09:16 PM, May 05, 2013
Beirut: Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halki survived a bomb attack on his convoy in Damascus on Monday, state media and activists said, as rebels struck in the heart of President Bashar al-Assad's capital. Six people were killed in the blast, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, the latest in a series of rebel attacks on government targets including a December bombing which wounded Assad's interior minister. Halki wields...
08:10 PM, Apr 29, 2013
Brussels: US Secretary of State John Kerry urged NATO on Tuesday to prepare for the possible use of chemical weapons by Syria on the same day that a senior Israeli military intelligence official said Syrian President Bashar Assad had used such weapons in March 2013 in his battle against insurgents. It was the first time Israel had accused the embattled Syrian leader of using his stockpile of nonconventional weapons. The...
07:28 AM, Apr 24, 2013
March was the bloodiest month yet in Syria's 2-year-old conflict with more than 6,000 documented deaths, a leading anti-regime activist group said on Monday, blaming the increase on heavier shelling and more violent clashes. ...
08:45 AM, Apr 02, 2013
President Barack Obama warned on Friday that an "enclave for extremism" could fill a leadership void in war-torn Syria, a chilling scenario for an already tumultuous region, especially for Jordan, Syria's neighbor and a nation at the crossroads of the struggle for stability in the Middle East. ...
05:40 AM, Mar 23, 2013
Syrian rebels fully captured a northern town near the Turkish border on December 25 after weeks of heavy fighting and attacked a regime air base in a neighboring province, activists said. The air base is in Aleppo province, where opposition fighters have already captured three other large military bases in recent months. Rebels have also laid siege to the international airport in the city of Aleppo, Syria's commercial capital, and...
07:04 PM, Dec 26, 2012
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12:50 PM, Dec 04, 2012
Vladivostok: Russia on Saturday soundly rejected US calls for increased pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to relinquish power. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to prod Moscow into supporting UN action to end the crisis in Syria and she expressed hope that Congress would repeal Cold War-era trade restrictions on Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, after meeting Clinton on the sidelines of a meeting of Pacific...
11:21 PM, Sep 08, 2012
Beirut: Syrian state-run news agency SANA says President Bashar Assad has appointed a new prime minister to replace one who defected this week to neighboring Jordan. Assad appointed Wael Nader al-Halqi, elevating him from the post of health minister. Halqi is a member of Assad's ruling Baath party and hails from the southern city of Daraa, birthplace of the Syrian uprising. The 48-year-old held the post of secretary general of...
05:27 PM, Aug 09, 2012
Beirut: Syrian President Bashar Assad made his first appearance on state TV in nearly three weeks Tuesday in a show of solidarity with a senior Iranian envoy, even as the US urged stepped up international planning for the regime's collapse. The visit to Damascus by the highest-ranking Iranian official since the uprising began coincided with a warning by an increasingly agitated Tehran that it holds the US responsible for the...
07:49 AM, Aug 08, 2012
United Nations: Russia remained at loggerheads with the US and its European allies ahead of a scheduled vote on Wednesday afternoon on a new Syria resolution and there appeared to be little hope that the UN's most powerful body would unite behind a plan to end the 17-month civil war in the country. The key stumbling block is the Western demand for a resolution threatening non-military sanctions and tied to...
11:09 AM, Jul 18, 2012
Beirut: Syrian rebels fired grenades at tanks and troops while regime armor shelled Damascus neighbourhoods on Monday, sending terrified families fleeing the most sustained and widespread fighting in the capital since the start of the uprising 16 months ago. A ring of fierce clashes nearly encircled the heavily guarded capital as rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar Assad pushed the civil war that has been building in Syria's impoverished provinces...
07:48 AM, Jul 17, 2012
Beirut: An opposition group that documents human rights violations in Syria says more than 17,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Bashar Assad began in March 2011. The violence has grown increasingly chaotic in recent months, and it is difficult to assign blame for much of the bloodshed as the country spirals toward civil war. The government restricts journalists from moving freely, making it impossible to independently...
07:08 PM, Jul 09, 2012
Beirut: Syrian President Bashar Assad defended his government's crackdown on opponents on Sunday, saying a doctor performing messy emergency surgery does not have blood on his hands if he is trying to save a patient. In his first speech since January, Assad appeared unmoved by scathing international criticism of his ferocious response to the 15-month-old revolt against his rule, which has killed up to 13,000 people, according to activist groups....
11:45 PM, Jun 03, 2012
The ground zero situation in Syria is very grim. In the city of Quasayr, makeshift field hospitals are treating wounded people under extremely difficult conditions. ...
11:05 PM, Jun 03, 2012
Beirut: Syrian state media said on Thursday that anti-regime bomb-makers accidentally set off blasts a day earlier that flattened parts of a residential area in the central city of Hama and killed at least 16 people. Syrian activists gave a different account, however, and blamed intense shelling by the regime. It was impossible to independently verify the conflicting accounts because President Bashar Assad's regime, facing a 13-month-old uprising, has restricted...
07:22 PM, Apr 26, 2012
Beirut: Syria promised to comply with a UN-brokered cease-fire beginning on Thursday but carved out an important condition - that the regime still has a right to defend itself against the terrorists that it says are behind the country's year-old uprising. The statement on Wednesday offered a glimmer of hope that a peace initiative by special envoy Kofi Annan could help calm the conflict, which has killed some 9,000 people....
08:32 AM, Apr 12, 2012
Beirut: Syrian forces bombarded parts of the shattered city of Homs on Saturday and for a second day blocked Red Cross aid meant for civilians stranded for weeks without food and fuel in the former rebel stronghold, activists and aid workers said. The renewed government assault came a day after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he had received "grisly reports" that President Bashar al-Assad's troops were executing, imprisoning and torturing...
03:31 AM, Mar 04, 2012
Over 90 people were killed in Homs in Syria on Friday. ...
09:27 AM, Feb 25, 2012
